Henry Cooper

by Norman Giller

  In the dressing-room afterwards a shaking, perspiring and clearly unwell Eamonn and Henry both agreed they did well to get three members of the jury to vote for Rocky. ‘No question Ali was the greatest,’ said Henry. ‘I guess I have just perjured myself.’

  It was Eamonn’s final television appearance and following his passing a few weeks later Henry assisted in the rites of Communion at the thanksgiving mass for our old friend at Westminster Cathedral. I was a member of Eamonn’s This Is Your Life scriptwriting team and can vouch that he was the most conscientious and masterful broadcaster in the television business, like Henry a professional from tip to toe. I know Henry would want me to pay Eamonn his dues in this book as being one of the friendliest and finest men you could ever wish to meet.

  Henry’s next re-establishing fight was against experienced black American Wayne Bethea at the vast Belle Vue Stadium in Manchester on 26 February 1962. It was an excellent workout for our hero and he won comfortably on points over ten rounds before, two months later, stopping a worn-out Joe Erskine in nine rounds at Nottingham. For poor old Joe, it was downhill to retirement, while for Henry big plans were being hatched.

  He stopped Dick Richardson again in the fifth round with a barrage of left hooks at Wembley on 26 March 1963, retaining his British and Empire titles. For one of the few times in his career, Henry lost his temper in the ring when the bulldozing Richardson caught him with a punch after the bell to end the third round. He retaliated with a combination of punches that rocked the huge Welshman and they had to be pulled apart by the referee and cornermen. ‘We were very annoyed with Our Enery,’ said a poker-faced Jim Wicks. ‘We don’t get paid for fighting between rounds and we could have got ourselves disqualified. That would have been a catastrophe.’ The press boys looked at him amazed. He actually did mean ‘a catastrophe’.

  Jim knew that negotiations were close to being completed for a world title fight eliminator – against a young American upstart from Louisville, Kentucky, by the name of Cassius Marcellus Clay.

  ROUND 6

  ENERY’S ’AMMER AND THE FEAT OF CLAY

  An unfunny thing happened to Cassius Clay on his way to a world championship challenge against Sonny Liston. Henry whacked him on the whiskers with his famed and feared left hook and for a few dramatic moments it looked as if he had thrown a spanner – or, rather, a hammer – into the works.

  Before telling Henry’s inside story of his most famous fight, let’s first of all sort out the source of the nickname for ‘Enery’s ’Ammer’. Even Henry used to get it wrong, telling interviewers that it had been dreamt up by ‘either Walter Bartleman in the Evening Star, Des Hackett in The Express or Peter Wilson in The Mirror.’

  It came in fact from the mouth of Jim Wicks and was captured and cemented by the pencil of Daily Express sports cartoonist Roy Ullyett, who with celebrated columnist Desmond Hackett often used to join Henry and The Bishop for their Friday fish lunches in Soho. I was a teammate of theirs for ten years in my earlier life as chief football reporter for The Express and I ghosted Roy’s While I Still Have Lead In My Pencil autobiography, in which he revealed: ‘Jim Wicks used to talk about “Our Enery’s ’Ammer” during our lunches and one day I felt inspired to go back to the office and draw a cartoon of Henry with a hammer in his left hand. From then on everybody called the left hook Enery’s ’Ammer. I never did collect my royalties.’

  When Henry came to Roy’s funeral some years later, I gave the eulogy and told the story of how, when Henry had a knee operation, he drew a cartoon showing the surgeon – scalpel in hand – standing over the anesthetised Henry as a nurse says: ‘This is one heck of a time to ask, “Does Henry have a good left hook and a bad right knee, or a good left knee and a bad right hook?”’

  Henry told me after the service: ‘I roared with laughter at the memory of that cartoon. It was a classic. I hope Roy’s family don’t think I was being disrespectful.’ Roy, the man who immortalised ‘Enery’s ’Ammer’, would have taken it as the best compliment he could have had.

  The most talked-about delivery of the ’Ammer came in the last seconds of the fourth round of a scheduled ten rounder at Wembley Stadium on 18 June 1963. On the receiving end: the most talked-about and talkative heavyweight in history, Cassius Clay. Years later, Henry recalled for me the unforgettable events leading up to a fight that was an official eliminator for the world title held by the fearsome Sonny Liston:

  From the moment the match was made we fancied our chances of catching Clay with the left hook. He had a hands-down style of boxing that left his chin unguarded, and throughout our training for the fight we practised feinting with our right and then whipping over the left hook.

  We got our sparring partners to skip backwards Clay-style with their hands down, and we got into the habit of moving diagonally forward so as to crowd Clay on to the ropes where he could not use his foot speed to get out of trouble.

  Jim Wicks asked his American contacts whose style most resembled Clay’s and he was told that a Mississippi-born heavyweight called Alonzo Johnson could do a perfect imitation. We brought him in as my chief sparring partner and he did a great job for us, boxing in Ali’s hands-down, fast-moving style. Alonzo was a lovely feller who just got on with his job, taking a lot of stick without complaint. He had boxed Clay in his eighth fight and lost on points over ten rounds. ‘I done got robbed,’ he told us. ‘I fought in Clay’s hometown of Louisville and even his own fans booed the verdict.’ It was the first of Ali’s fights to be shown on national television and he got a roasting from the critics. Several of them agreed that Alonzo should have got at least a draw.

  We’d been more aware than most of the style of Clay for three years. We had watched on telly when he outpointed one of our old opponents, the Aussie Tony Madigan, in the Olympic light-heavyweight semi-finals in Rome in 1960. Our opinion then was that he was flash, too fast on his feet to be a big hitter and that his chin was always a tempting target. We reckoned he had taken a lot of his amateurish habits into the professional game with him and saw flaws in his defence that we were determined to expose.

  The British public didn’t like Clay at all when he arrived in London for the fight, shooting his mouth off and shouting things like, ‘Any more jive, and Cooper will fall in five.’ And he went way too far when he called me a bum and a cripple. I never found the need to insult my opponents and saying things like that was disrespectful and unnecessary. People thought he was getting under our skin because we refused to react to his taunts, but we were happy for him to fill pages and pages with his rabbiting because we were on a percentage of ancillary rights and so the more people who watched on TV or at the cinema, the more dosh we got.

  Clay didn’t do himself any favours with the crowd when he came swaggering into the ring wearing a huge crown that somebody had found for him in the wardrobes at the Palladium, where we weighed in with 2,000 people looking on from the theatre seats. He wore the pantomime crown for a laugh but most spectators thought it was in poor taste and booed him into the ring. I just watched it all with a sort of tight smile and thought what a nutter he was.

  The only upmanship I got on him was when we were posing for photographs at the weigh-in and I noticed he had just one hair growing from his chest. I reached forward and pulled it out, and his eyes opened wide before he laughed out loud.

  We pulled a stroke at the weigh-in. Jim was concerned that me weighing just under thirteen stone would give Clay a psychological boost. I had worked so hard in training that I was barely over the light-heavyweight limit. Jim, of course, was an expert on handicaps and racing weights, and he arranged for me to step on the scales with flat lead plate-weights in the sole of my boxing boots and I held another lead weight in my right hand. They added about six pounds. Not a lot, but it at least made me seem like a heavyweight. What a rascal Jim could be!

  It was an unforgettable big fight night, full of pomp and ceremony as Jack Solomons called on every trick he had learned in his long career as a promoter who al
ways mixed showbiz with boxing. To call the atmosphere electric would have been an understatement; more like nuclear. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, the world’s most glamorous couple at the time and fresh from making the controversial Cleopatra, were among the 55,000-strong crowd singing in drizzling rain to the music of the Coldstream Guards band. Then, heralded by eight trumpeters dressed as if for a coronation, came the two gladiators, picked out in spotlights, Henry from the home dressing-room used by England’s footballers and Clay approaching from where the visiting teams prepared for action. Ear-splitting cheers for Cooper, just as loud jeers for the cocky Clay, who looked more clown than king with the Palladium pantomime crown perched on his head. The choruses of derision when Clay climbed into the ring were so loud that the ring announcements could hardly be heard. It was sheer bedlam. But all the hullabaloo had no effect on the kid from Kentucky as he strutted around the ring as if he owned Wembley.

  Henry, eight years older and twenty-six pounds lighter than his jet-paced opponent, surprised Clay by opening up much more aggressively than in his usual cautious starts to contests, and within a minute referee Tommy Little was warning Clay for holding as Henry worked to the body like a man possessed. ‘Gaseous Cassius’ suddenly knew it was not going to be as easy as he had been boasting and he twice looked appealingly at the referee as Henry roughed him up inside, trying to make the most of his experience as a professional against a relative baby having only his nineteenth fight.

  At the end of a fast and furious first round there was a sign of blood – and it was coming from Clay’s nose, on which the Cooper jab had been beating a tattoo.

  The second round was even, with Clay now carrying the fight to Cooper and jabbing more effectively. Henry tried hard to drive him back to the ropes, but he was dancing and side-stepping his way out of danger every time the British champion set himself for a two-fisted attack. He was responding to the shouted commands from trainer Angelo Dundee: ‘Stick and move… stick and move…’ In English lingo, that meant jab and move.

  All was going to plan for Henry until in the third round he was hit by his old hoodoo – Clay had opened a cut over his left eye with a chopping right hand counter. Suddenly Henry was looking through a veil of blood and now there was desperation in his punches as Clay began toying with him so contemptuously that Bill Faversham – head of the syndicate of white businessmen who owned his contract – screamed out: ‘Stop clowning, Clay, and get the job done!’ He knew that a multi-million dollar title fight with Liston was next on the menu and Sonny’s manager Jack Nilon was there to confirm it.

  Jim Wicks wanted to stop the fight at the end of the third round because the gash was so deep, but Henry demanded one more round. And what a round!

  It has become etched into fight folklore, with blurred and exaggerated details. But from this distance, let’s try to get the facts right and sort the truth from the legend.

  Clay continued to clown and box with his hands down at his waist, rolling out of the way of Henry’s punches and making him miss with clever and at times audacious ring movement. It was clear – cockily and confidently – he was trying to make the fight last until the fifth round, as he had so noisily predicted. Syndicate boss Faversham was going apoplectic because he knew the millions of dollars that were riding on a victory.

  Clay could not have cared less about Faversham and his business partners, against whom he was secretly plotting, ready for a change of name and management. He was interested only in getting the nominated round right, as he had done in most of his previous fights. It was a dangerous gimmick, an ego trip through a minefield. While he was playing the fool it meant he was not hitting Henry and making the cut worse, and all the time our hero was plotting and planning how he could get home with his hammer.

  The round was into its last ten seconds when Clay got himself trapped in a neutral corner as Henry fired a succession of left jabs. They were all range finders for the following left hook that landed on an arc flush on the right side of Clay’s jaw.

  He fell back into the ropes and slithered slowly to the canvas like a giant puppet that had suddenly had its strings cut away. His eyes were as wide as if he had been hypnotised, mirroring a mixture of astonishment and anguish. The count had reached five and Clay (dropped only once before, by Sonny Banks) made the novice decision to get up on legs that were betraying him, but before Henry – acknowledged as one of the best finishers in the business – could move in, the bell rang. Never before in the history of British sport had the ringing of a bell stopped the nation’s breath.

  There was pandemonium and those of us used to being at Wembley for FA Cup finals and England football internationals were convinced we had never heard a roar like the one that greeted Clay’s knockdown. It was not so much like a clap of thunder as an animal growl coming from thousands of British throats. This was Last Night of the Proms xenophobia but with a savagery that would have rocked the bust of Henry Wood off its plinth. Richard Burton’s famous Welsh voice could be heard booming: ‘Finish him, Henry, finish him!’ Liz Taylor was hiding her face.

  Clay tried to show he was unhurt, but his senses were so scattered that he reeled back to his corner like a drunk on his way home from the pub. Angelo Dundee slapped his thighs as he sat him down on the stool and as sponged water rained on Clay’s head he instinctively tried to stand up as if to get back into the fight. What appeared to be illegal smelling salts were pressed under his nostrils and he pulled a grotesque face that made him look much older than his twenty-one years. While all this was going on, the crafty, ring-wise Dundee was summoning referee Tommy Little to show him that there was a split in Ali’s right glove – not confessing until years later that he had made the split worse by digging in his thumb and pushing out horsehair.

  Now we enter the world of myth and mystery. Many observers, including experienced boxing writers, claimed that Dundee’s chicanery earned Clay an extra twenty to thirty seconds of recovery time. Even Henry, deluded by the reports, used to repeat the allegation in his after-dinner speeches.

  Much as I would like to perpetuate the legend, I have to say I have been in the BBC archives department and watched the unedited version of the fight in real time. The interval between the fourth and fifth rounds actually lasted sixty-six seconds, which means that the Dundee gamesmanship gained just an extra six seconds. Some reports even said that Clay had his glove changed; I can state categorically that when Clay went out for the fifth round the new glove had not even arrived at ringside. My dad was a boxing fanatic who worked as gloves-minder for Jack Solomons in return for a free ticket to the major fights. His acquaintance with the veteran promoter went back to pre-war days, when Jack was in the fishmongering and betting business and Dad the bookie’s runner.

  Dad told me: ‘The box in which the spare set of gloves was kept was never out of my sight and the British Boxing Board of Control steward didn’t ask for the replacement glove until the fifth round was under way.’

  By the time the glove was relayed to the ringside, the fight was all over. Clay came out for the fifth round with the one intention of getting things finished before Henry could give him another taste of his hammer. A fusillade of lefts and rights landed on his damaged eye and blood gushed as if being pumped out.

  Liz Taylor, now brave enough to watch, was among the many ringside spectators screaming for referee Tommy Little to stop the fight. It was not a pretty sight.

  After one minute fifteen seconds of the fifth round, and with a desperate Jim Wicks up on the apron of the ring ready to throw in the towel, the referee waved his arms and called it off, saying to our bloody hero: ‘Sorry, chum, the fight’s over.’

  Henry, hitting the air in frustration, said: ‘We didn’t do bad for a bum and a cripple, did we?’

  The Bishop said: ‘Enery did us proud, but the mince pie let us down.’ Malapropism gave way to Cockney rhyming slang, a language in which Wicks was fluent.

  Clay, to his credit, was polite and dignified in victory, refusing to put the
crown back on as one of his entourage jumped into the ring with it. He said many times later: ‘Henry hit me so hard he shook up my ancestors in Africa.’

  Henry had almost buttoned the Louisville Lip and the fact that he was knocked down sent signals to the Liston camp that he would be easy meat for old Sonny. The crown passed to Clay when he humiliated Liston in two fights, during which Cassius made his break with the all-white syndicate which he claimed owned him like a slave, changed his name to Muhammad Ali and became the puppet of Black Muslims. He was never really his own man during his boxing career.

  Even in defeat, Henry was a hero and the fight made him famous around the world. But for the rest of his life he had to live with the ‘if only’ scenario.

  If only we had landed the left hook in the first minute of the round rather than the last we’re convinced we would have knocked him out. We don’t like blowing our own trumpet, but there were few who could match us for finishing off an opponent if we had him going… and Clay was out on his feet when he scrambled up. That showed his inexperience and also that he didn’t know what day it was. Those big eyes of his were rolling and his legs were wobbly like jelly.

  He should have been looking to stay down for at least eight seconds. We know we’d have finished him off if the bell had not rung. He was also lucky to fall against the ropes. If I’d landed the punch when we were in the centre of the ring I don’t think he would have got up in twenty seconds, let alone ten.

  Ali, as he became, often said that the sight of blood sickened him and that he wanted to look away when I was bleeding. He probably meant that in the cold light of day, but in the ring when it mattered he saw his advantage and came after me with an animal instinct for a finish. I was the prey and he was the hunter, and he wasn’t going to let me go. And I don’t blame him. The old fight game ain’t for faint hearts.